The Seeds of Your Culture

how to hire the best

Here’s a sneak peek into my upcoming book: How To Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (Releasing November 18, 2020)

The Seeds of Your Culture

 

Your Immutable Laws

Attracting A-Players becomes easier and easier as you intentionally develop a good culture. Every business has a culture. Your Immutable Laws are the seeds for the culture in your business. 

Display your Immutable Laws proudly on your website. Incorporate them in your contracts. It’s not enough to list your Immutable Laws and share them prominently. You want to weave these into your everyday conversations with team members, clients, and vendors. How do you do that?

Storytelling

Make use of storytelling to reinforce the culture of your business. Remember the times you felt really proud of something a team member did? There’s a great story in there. Tell it . . . over and over. It’s okay if your team members think you have dementia because you keep telling the same stories over and over. You are reinforcing your Immutable Laws and creating a culture. Don’t worry. Soon you will have more stories to add to your collection. Be on the lookout for team members’ wins and successes with respect to demonstrating your Immutable Laws. When you catch them doing something awesome, or hear that feedback from a client, share the story at your next team meeting. Tie it back to one of your Immutable Laws. 

Your Immutable Laws are observable outside of your company. For example, I was introduced to Brian Gottlieb by Tony Mancini. When Tony suggested I connect with Brian Gottlieb from Tundraland, he described Brian as a good leader and businessman. However, it was Tony’s description of the culture Brian built at Tundraland that made the biggest impression on me. Here is what Tony said: 

His employees are fanatics. They are absolute fanatics about the company, about what they do, why it’s important, the satisfaction they get from it outside of straight compensation. To me, as you look at that next generation of workers, my goodness, there’s nothing that’s going to be more important than that. It needs to be bigger than the job and compensation, and he’s made that. He’s created a culture where it’s bigger than the job, and it’s bigger than them remodeling. It’s much bigger than that. That’s almost a byproduct of who they are.

An Impactful Culture

Imagine building a culture so impactful people describe ​your team members that way. Imagine people describing your company that way. Imagine making ​that​ impression on people. 

Entrepreneur Diane Hatfield of Hatfield Builders and Remodelers includes respect as an Immutable Law to build a company culture where everyone is treated well. Diane believes in treating her team members with the respect with which she would like to be treated. As she puts it: 

I treat them with the respect that I would want to be treated when I’m working with someone and for someone. I know what it’s like to work in a crap environment. Chad does, too. I know what it’s like to have a manager who micromanages people, talked down to people, and didn’t trust people. I worked for her for years, and it was awful. We got along because I knew how to manage her. I want to treat our staff members with the love and respect that I would want to receive . . . When we think about things with a cool, level head, and we give them the opportunity to speak and talk and put out their ideas, it becomes more productive, and it becomes a better environment . . . They’re not just our staff, our employees, they’re really valuable people to us, and we cannot do this without them. This business does not operate the way that we’ve got it operating right now without them. 

That mindset ensures Chad and Diane create and protect an environment in which high performers can—and will—thrive. 

For tips on how to work through these problems and coach your team more effectively, please be sure to check out How To Hire the Best:The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members, releasing November 18, 2020.

About The Author

Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist and international best-selling author of the How to Hire the Best series and The 4 Week Vacation™, is the founder of Tap the Potential and host of the Profit by Design podcast. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business.

We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Clients in our Better Business, Better Life coaching program have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than they’ve ever had. Next, we send them off on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate their hard-earned journey to take their life back!

Dr. Sabrina and her team at Tap the Potential are on a mission to change the story of entrepreneurship from one of long hours, grinding it out, to one of sustainably profitable businesses that support and enhance life. The Tap the Potential Solution™ and our Tap the Potential Family of Business Owners are disrupting small business as usual. We are on our way to making the Tap the Potential Solution™ the mainstream model for growing business.

By 2023, 150 Tap the Potential clients will have taken 4 Week Vacations. These are the trailblazers, role modeling what’s possible for entrepreneurs. In many entrepreneurial circles, it is becoming more and more common for one entrepreneur to ask another, “Have you taken a 4 Week Vacation™?” (as opposed to asking “How many employees do you have?” or “What is your annual revenue?”). Taking a fully unplugged 4 Week Vacation is rapidly becoming the recognized symbol of entrepreneurial success.

Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses—no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing—and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths.

As The Business Psychologist, and with her years of driving profit in small businesses, Dr. Sabrina knows what it takes to find, keep, and motivate exceptional performance out of your biggest investment—team members.